NASHUA – Moving a business into a long-empty building is never easy, because you have to worry about things like whether the walls are still at right angles to the floor.

Unless, that is, they aren’t supposed to be at right angles to the floor.

“They are petty impressive, aren’t they?” asked Corey Hebert, gazing up at some of the twisted, 40-foot concrete-covered columns and walls in the former Boulder Morty’s gym at 250 Commercial St., which in a month or two will be crawling (quite literally) with customers.

Hebert, owner of the Vertical Dreams climbing gym in the Manchester Millyard, is expanding into the building, creating a second branch of his 14-year-old business.

“It is wonderful for me to see it reopen,” said Dorothea Silber, who owned and oversaw Boulder Morty’s for a decade with her late husband, Allan, and her son Ken.

“It pleases me … to see that place rejoin the community. My children grew up there,” Ken Silber said. “That was our dream, to create a place where the community could come, change lives and bring lives together.”

Boulder Morty’s, the first climbing gym in the area, opened in 1998 on the site of the family’s former foundry, N. Kamenske and Co., which had burned in March 1996.

Boulder Morty’s thrived but became too much for the family to run in the years after Allan Silber’s death in 2003. The Silbers decided to sell and closed Bolder Morty’s in August 2008, but the recession arrived before they could close a deal to sell the 1.7-acre property for redevelopment.

“It was bad for the family when it fell through. At the same time, that did open up hope that maybe the right person’s going to come along and reopen this,” said Ken Silber.

Not much has changed since then. The big funky sign is still out on the road, only slightly vandalized; ropes and climbing caribiners still are hanging from high up on the ceiling; hundreds of individual handholds are still screwed into the walls, although Hebert will replace them all, just in case.

Even the whiteboards are unchanged, and still have the handmade notes and drawings left by departing staff.

Hebert founded Vertical Dreams 14 years ago in a then-empty portion of a former mill in Manchester. Notable for a 75-foot climbing area in an old elevator shaft, it has been a magnet ever since for rock climbers and “boulderers,” beginners and wanna-be’s, school groups and club outings and parties.

Business hardly has slowed even in these hard times, said Hebert, 37.

“I don’t want to use the term ‘recession-proof’ … but people are sticking around the area, and they still want something fun to do,” he said. He has two full-time and eight part-time employees, and he already has been contacted by plenty of prospective Nashua employees.

Hebert said he has been eyeing the former Boulder Morty’s for several years. After he reached an agreement on a long-term lease on the building, with option to buy, he plunged.

Hebert has worked in construction much of his life and has been crawling over the outside of the building for weeks. The big job was replacing the heating/ventilation/air condition – the dreaded HVAC that can eat up a construction budget in no time – that had been damaged by falling ice over the years.

Now he’s working on the floor, with its concrete base and padded cover. The walls must be painted and all the handholds reinstalled for new climbing routes.

Hebert doesn’t plan to have a retail store in the space, partly because “they don’t do well with climbing gyms” and partly because he has an arrangement with outdoor-goods retailer EMS, but he does hope to make a fitness area that would specialize in cross-training with a climbing component.

He will, however, keep the indoor balcony where parents can sit at tables and overlook their kids climbing. He’ll also have joint memberships between the two branches.

Most importantly, Hebert said he plans to expand the informal, friendly atmosphere of Vertical Dreams, including lessons for anybody who walks in off the street.

“Some places can feel corporate,” he said. “That’s not what Vertical Dreams is about.”

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.